I hope you are not tired of hearing about this few day summer school held in at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week. I’ve already blogged about the trip; on dancing in Austen and the program, in response to Izzy’s pithy wry blog; and a brief resume of my intended contribution to a panel on film adaptation. What more is there to say? Well, my usual reports on the gist of talks and panels I attended. I have not yet even made it clear that the novel we were to focus on was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice her most popular and widely-known and read novel.

Two of the lectures were very much in the traditional close reading thematized argument tradition; while the presentations on the panels were about the larger modern context and intertextualities of Austen’s books: romance, Austen on the Internet, the effect of globalisation (post-colonialism) and film adaptations and sequels. For this blog I’ll first treat the two traditional lectures and then one of the panels.

The first lecture of the program was James Thompson’s on “Manners Envy in Pride and Prejudice.” He began by saying that the niceties in Austen matter. There was a kind of manners envy in this era when people at least thought they knew rules of deportment. The conduct books of the era arose from a a mythic idea (I’d call it an anxiety) that there are (unwritten?) rules we want to learn; while manners can seem frivolous and trivial as a topic, they are often indications of our ethics and larger attitudes towards life. Prof Thompson suggested that Austen’s books present a kind of sociology of small group interactions. In P&P we have no car crashes, no exploding death star, but the consequences of conversations.

The lecture was grounded in Irving Goffman’s books (e.g., Stigma: Management of a Spoiled Identity; The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life): in Goffman’s work we find that the self as understood is the product of social transactions; these are immediate and often the transaction is defensive. These transactions are subject to evaluation; he spoke also of a people as vulnerable objects in ritual fields of gamesmanship. (It sounds far scarier than any car crash.) You are supposed to learn how to fake interest and concern in other people. This is a form of socially controlling others: everyone acts so as to insure there is an assertion of genuine feeling or concern. Now strangers’ conversation is not as predictable to people (someone you have not yet met, a kind of occasion you have not yet gone to); and people open themselves to embarrassing interpretations. (Prof Thompson did mention how Lydia did not fit in here as she ignored decorum and was overtly insensitive.) He quoted some 18th century authorities too: Adam Smith on how sympathy enables social cohesion. Safeguards for this society were their (supposed) shared values.

Prof Thompson’s basic thesis was that Darcy and Elizabeth behave atrociously to one another at first, they are very rude, and it takes a long time for their first wrong impressions of one another to break down. Darcy is stigmatized by the way he behaves at the local assemblies. He said the two people fully know what is owed to one another and deliberately fail to do it. He felt they talked of nothing of substance (I don’t think that’s so when they are at Netherfield during Jane’s illness.) The second half of P&P is devoted to remediation of what went wrong in the first half. Austen, he felt, turned to the epistolary mode in this latter part of her book, to give us a sense of the process of the their minds meeting; we track Elizabeth’s state of mind. The novel is not a full-fledged bildingsroman, but does show us characters developing, transforming aspects of themselves and not for sheerly didactic reasons. By the end of the book Darcy and Elizabeth apologize to one another; he felt no one else apologized. (I’d say Mr Bennet may be seen as an exception when he expresses remorse over his blind decision to allow Lydia to go to Brighton where the place would be filled with single officers thinking no one would pay her any mind because she lacks any money; if you want sex from someone they need not have money.) Prof Thompson ended on what makes for good (& perhaps pleasant) conversation: it entails pleasing others, being reciprocal.

His talk elicited much conversation with his audience. I didn’t take notes on this and can remember only my own contribution and one other. I played a mild devil’s advocate by remembering how in Frances Burney D’Ablay’s diaries, journals and letters, she often shows people behaving atrociously to one another. In 18th century society many people, especially those who were of a higher rank than others, did not feel they had to be polite at all. Many of the characters in P&P are very rude to one another, to take just the obvious example beyond Lydia, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. They are unfeeling; Mr Bennet, irritated by his wife, undermines and makes fun of her. Mr Collins’s crass stupidity and unexamined adoption of the most materialistic of norms, measuring everything in number and by how much an item costs leads to his continually making grating remarks on sore areas; he is not just absurd but cruel in the letter where he tells Mr Bennet he should dismiss Lydia from his mind and let her live as she may (on the streets) and never forgive her (as this is in his best social interest). But all agreed this was a very fruitful way of discussing the content of this novel.

Frontispece for Louise D’Epinay’s Conversations d’Émilie, a dialogue recollecting the education of her granddaughter (1774)

In her lecture, Prof Jessica Richards contextualized “education and experience” in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (and other novels) by discussing Austen’s connection to the didactic novels of her day, and especially the theorists on education of the time which were strongly influential on women’s novels. Women themselves wrote such books and treatises (e.g., Felicite-Stephanie de Genlis’s Adele et Theodore, Mary Wollstonecraft’s critiques of educational treatises in her Vindication of the Rights of Women). Prof Richards concentrated though on Locke’s Some thoughts Concerning Education, a widely-read book of the era.

She began by quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who famously lambasted critics for writing about Austen’s books as disciplinary didactic stories in which we have the spectacle of a girl taught lessons in what she “must” do. While it’s true the simplistic conventional lessons said to be central to Austen’s books turn them into 3rd grade pablum, the reality is they do teach lessons — highly sceptical ones, but lessons nonetheless. Of Lucy Steele’s story in S&S the narrator remarks it

may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.

Austen is in fact intensely concerned with education or a child’s upbringing and adult experiences that influence people in her novels; who they marry, who are their parents, how their relationships affect them.

Prof Richards then went over the variety of ways of schooling offered in the UK in the 18th century: at home, dissenting academies, infant schools, charity schools, governesses and tutors, universities, apprenticeships. She proceeded to discuss Locke’s innovative humane and psychological approach; Locke is not punitive but enlists the child in his or her education, trying to use the child’s nature. Her choice of quotations was appealing. We can’t know for sure that Austen read Locke but if she didn’t she surely read others who had read him or been influenced directly or indirectly and she agreed with his basic outlook with this difference: she is sceptical about our ability to learn or change from explicit lessons and not sure how far people’s innate dispositions can be changed. Finally she went through P&P showing how Elizabeth teaches herself lessons and Darcy allows himself to be taught a lesson.

This time there was not enough time for discussion afterwards but what there was was productive for people made objections as well agreeing. Someone quoted Elizabeth’s quip to Jane: “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing” (III:54). Prof Thompson talked about fixed dispositions in Austen and how difficult it is for those who have to live with corrosive (I’ll call them) characters with such fixed dispositions to cope with them. I remembered how deeply pessimistic Austen was in her most frank unfinished fiction, The Watsons. Emma Watson, the heroine, says early on “I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like” (Penguin, Drabble ed, p 110). She can think of nothing worse. Jane Fairfax compares governessing to slavery, anticipating the portrait of a governess’s life in Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey.

On Friday morning we had our first plenary panel called “Jane Austen and Romance,” where three stimulating talks were given. Prof Sarah Frantz spoke about “chick lit” versus “popular romance. Her thesis was that chick lit focuses on its heroine(s) and while we see them searching for an (social) identity and security, the books trace their psychological development; popular romance provides us with a hero’s journey, a transformation whereby he becomes a worthy partner (we might then call him good husband material) for the heroine. Austen’s novels combine the two types. Austen’s novels assume marriage is as much a necessity for male as for female happiness; they enable a female fantasy about what men need to learn to be a good companion to women.

Prof Frantz argued that Austen’s books have been strongly influential on the way we see women characters. She cited Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary as the foundational chick lit book. She thought these have identical thematic concerns, are recognizable by their pink covers (here she probably meant the popular trash or junk and shallow ones, for one could argue that many an Orange Prize book is chick lit); further examples include Candace Bushnell’s novels. They culminate in the heroine achieving some level of self-understanding. Prof Frantz’s own work concentrates on popular romance meant for women to read (often written by women) where the gaze is that of women constructing an ideal male — though some of these are novels about male homosexuals.

Darcy (Colin Firth) stops to ask a prostitute for information during his quest to retrieve Lydia (1995 P&P scripted by Andrew Davies)

Prof Frantz used Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of Romance, a study of prose fiction fiction focusing on courtship and betrothal. Regis has identified ten or so events all these novels usually have: the meeting, the barrier (something which must keep the couple apart), attraction, a declaration (“I love you”), a point of ritual death (where the relationship seems to be over irretrievably), recognition (as when the arrow darts through Emma telling her that Mr Knightley must marry no one but her), and finally betrothal. She quoted contemporary readers and reviews of Austen’s books which seemed to her to recognize the chick-lit and popular romance aspects of Austen’s work. Annabella Millibank (later Lord Byron’s unhappy estranged wife) wrote of P&P that it’s “not a crying book;” the interest is “very strong, especially in Mr Darcy;” and that it was “the most probable fiction I have ever read.” From the Critical Review of 1813, Ms Frantz read several sentences on Elizabeth to the effect that she teaches men with family pride to know themselves. At the close of P&P Darcy says he has learned about himself through Elizabeth’s reactions to him.

Emma Calabrese (a graduate student) gave the liveliest talk of all I heard. Hers was listed as about the adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, but what she talked about was a very successful vlog (video blog) of 100 episodes in which a young actress played a modern female character whose story and circumstances jokingly updates and parodies Austen’s P&P. It’s a first person narration done in a confessional style where romance and friendship are explored and found to be not necessarily compatible. I’ve embedded the first episode as the top of this blog; as the episodes went on Lizzie Bennet’s voice became less dominant as characters beyond herself, her best friend, Charlotte and sisters Jane and Lydia were joined by boyfriends and their stories developed. All the characters became part of the action which could be unmediated by Lizzie; see for example Goodbye Jane.

It’s been so successful that a huge amount of donated money was collected and soon there should be a DVD of all them. Ms Calabrese talked about how individual episodes connect to their viewers’ lives. The intense friendship of Lizzie and Charlotte is central to the experience; Lizzie and Lydia’s argument while apparently superficial (“where did I park my car?”) and upbeat normalizing (“a party girl’s guide”) convey real experiences. She liked how the series included personal aging and a sense of the cost of romance. the video blogs also allow for all kinds of narrative style.

Afterwards in our hotel room, Izzy found the Lizzie Bennet site and we watched a few episodes and then she read aloud to me a couple of on-line sequels to Austen with similar kinds of modern comic takes on P&P especially (one with Elizabeth as the narrator of letters written after she had married Darcy and gives a party and dance). I find it important that such a self-generated site (not attached to any institution or coterie group within one) can attract huge amounts of attention, and become commercially successful.

Prof Kumarini Silva’s talk, “Jane Austen and Global Desire,” was openly personally rooted. Ms Silva was born in Sri Lanka and lived for a while in the UK. Her country’s history, landscape, culture, has been profoundly altered by its occupation first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch, and before independence (relative) the British. It has endured many internal civil wars as a result of colonial practices. She went to a private all-girls school and remembered female British teachers who seemed to come out of 19th century British novels, e.g., Miss Nichols who left at 35 when she married; another woman who had a nervous breakdown from the heat, stress, and girls’ behavior. The school systems deviated from that of public schools as of the 12th grade when the private school followed a British curriculum. The girls read Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen. The aim was to instill in them their upper class status, by exemplifying white norms and worlds of privilege. The gateway to power and gratification were white manners, white dress, and they were taught these through white books — like Austen’s. The Austen books and their progeny were seen by the girls as self-help books; they provided models to make yourself over.

Thus this talk was a serious critique of post-colonial films, the transatlantic and accented Austen films. These films present the non-anglo world through Anglo-American eyes; beauty is defined by white norms; to follow these is made to seem easy for all and provide upward mobility to all one’s desires. She told of a scholarship (I didn’t get down the details) where there was a pretense of inclusiveness, but in fact you had to have a lot of money to participate; also of schemes intended to make sure colonial British citizens do not stay in the UK (you get the money you paid for your time if you return to your home country within a stipulated limited time).

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Picturesque book illustration of Manydown Parke — where Austen went to dances in her Hampshire area (Harris Bigg-Wither’s home, which she could have been mistress of had she married him)

There were also what I’ll call study groups: a few times a day everyone divided into four groups and meet in four rooms, each named after a house in P&P: Longbourne, Pemberley, Rosings, Netherfield. Those which occurred directly after a particular panel could discuss the topics of the panels. In one “at” Longbourne, Prof Frantz argued that the construction of an ideal male in popular romance was empowering for women. This is of course to elevate the importance of romances in our lived lives. People talked about this.

Bhaji on the Beach, a 1993 realistic romance film about a day out by Gurinder Chahda (see the last part: some reality)

I’ll conclude this blog with this objection: if it be that an image or norm for masculinity favorable to women’s needs, liberty, rights as human beings has been formulated in some of these books, it cannot be proven that these romances have been more than one element in altering some of the aggressive (pro-violent) anti-feminist norms of masculinity. At best women in modern cultures increasing manage to evade conformist demands that they cooperate as wives, mothers, and family members to promote the success, ego, and pride of the male and they do this when they get a high-paying job and control their reproduction (have control of their bodies and complete access to contraception). Still that reading and discussing Jane Austen leads to considering such issues (see an archeaology of women’s experiences) suggests her books are important cultural sites today and why a university might respectably devote money and time to a Jane Austen Summer Program in a state where so many people are desperately poor, unemployed, and without opportunities or the wherewithal genuinely to improve their lives.

[…] to comfort and give me company by such a present. She and I and Yvette had dinner together at the Jane Austen Summer Program do in North Carolina in June 2013 . A restaurant you had to know was there to find it; a gate before you got in. The […]